


Never Shall I Nether

by parcequelle



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s04e16 Who Are You?, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-01
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-04-02 00:19:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4040200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parcequelle/pseuds/parcequelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Willow and Tara deal with the aftermath of the Netherworld spell, and each other. (Post-4x16 "Who Are You?")</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Shall I Nether

**Author's Note:**

> For the absentee Best Girl, who got me hooked on Buffy in the first place.

The aftermath of the whole magical body-switching deal leaves everyone feeling a little weird. Buffy is avoiding Riley, though it's not like he's going out of his way to bang down her door either, and after a couple of hours of sitting in front of her psych homework, sighing, she slams her textbook shut and announces that she's going home, to Joyce.

"Just for the night," she promises, in what Willow now knows to be her Trying For Reassuring But Not Quite Getting There voice. "I don't have class until 11 tomorrow, and Mom can maybe drop me off at campus on her way to work. She usually goes in late on Wednesdays."

"Okay," Willow says, trying for chipper and a reassuring smile of her own; she isn't sure if she's successful, but the effort is there.

"I--" Buffy stops, fiddling with the fraying strap of her backpack. "I can't concentrate, not here. My attempts at studying are proving even more fruitless than usual."

"Can't stop thinking, huh?"

Buffy shrugs. "Curse of the Slayer, right? Things are out to get you long enough, you start to get paranoid."

Willow cracks a smile at that, stands up from where she's seated at her own desk. "Your mom will be happy."

"Yeah, she will." Buffy smiles back. "I know it's stupid -- Faith's gone, and I somehow know she won't be back, at least for a while, but I still--"

"--worry," Willow finishes. "I know. I would, too, if Faith were alone in my house with _my_ mother, or with my... anything important to me." She shudders, the possibility still too close for comfort. "Go on, go have... fun?" She hears the way it sounds outside her head, frowns. "Well, have something. Quality time with your loving and occasionally neglected parent. If you leave now you can probably make it back to have dinner with her."

"Don't think I didn't notice that casual reprimand in there, Will. But okay, I'm going. Now don't you go getting up to no good while I'm gone, young missy, you hear me?"

"I hear ya. It's just me and my books here." Willow pats one in illustration. "Book party. Just books, see? No no-goodness to be had."

"Don't forget to eat something in the midst of all the partying. I know how your book parties can get out of hand."

Willow smiles indulgently. "I won't, Mom."

Hand on the knob, door ajar, Buffy turns. "Hey, Will? If Riley calls, will you--"

"--tell him you're not here. Gotcha."

"Thanks." She smiles, embarassment creasing the lines of her mouth. "I do want to talk to him about all this, I do, just... not now. Not yet."

"I get it," she tells her, thinking of Oz. "The secret of your whereabouts is safe with me."

"Thanks, Will. Have fun with your books."

Willow smiles. "I always do."

*

Willow's actually sorta proud that it isn't the first thing she does. She waits. Buffy leaves, the sound of her impressively chunky platform heels swallowed quickly by the muffled noise of the dormroom hall, and Willow, in exactly the not-no-good way that she had promised, turns back to her notes and continues to read.

Ujrjuyetiodj, slfjeofjr, poshjdo luesyer opsj xjh jmelsdhfoe't fbjekkshf dkeish klo mejhefosgf kd--

This is the last sentence of the paragraph she has been trying unsuccessfully to comprehend for the past fifteen minutes. Could this be the result of some incantation? Is some malevolent spiritual presence altering her perceptions, her ability to read or to recognise language?

Suddenly alert, she blinks, looks again.

Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by--

So no incantation, then, at least not a consistent one; it's just her, not being able to concentrate because she's thinking about other things. Thinky things. Thinky things that require concentration and contemplation and contention and circumspection and other significant nouns beginning with 'c'.

Maybe, she reasons, it would be a more sensible to course of action to devote the necessary attention to these thinky things, to indulge them in order to purge them and thereby free her mind of the obstacles preventing her from allocating her full, or at least somewhat-closer-to-full, allotment of brain power to studying? Maybe, she thinks, that's the best thing to do. It probably is. Surely, even.

Resolved, she closes the book (with a resounding thud that satisfies her more than she'd like to admit), and crosses the room to where the telephone sits, calmly, awaiting her. She narrows her eyes at it, wondering if it knew she would come; if it somehow knew before she did. She decides it's rather unlikely that the telephone has developed sentient powers within the last forty-five minutes -- Riley did call, and Willow was pleased to not have to lie when she told him that Buffy had just left, that he'd just missed her -- picks up the receiver, and dials.

The anticlimactic fact that it beeps out, an even beep of thoroughly unanswered beepiness, is not something she had been expecting. Having convinced herself that this was the key to her renewed concentration and studiousness, Willow is now somewhat at a loss. In the time-honoured tradition of college students everywhere, therefore, she deals with this sudden hindrance by flopping back onto her bed and seeking solace in the fluffiness of her bunny.

Could the phone really have it in for her, she wonders? Could it be working for Giles, or worse, for her mother, and somehow be sensing that she isn't studying when she should be? Maybe she should break out a spell book or two and perform a basic illumination spell, reveal if there are any magicks at work here? Maybe she should--

She jumps, or whatever the equivalent is to jumping when you're lying, and reaches over to answer the now, somewhat suspiciously, ringing phone.

"Hey Riley, I know you want to talk to her, but she's--"

"It's, uh, not Riley," says the voice at the other end, though Willow knows that, of course, as soon as it speaks.

"Yeah," she says, and she's smiling, when did she start smiling? "Good."

"Good?"

Willow can hear the swallowed half-laugh on the other end, pictures Tara ducking her head as she says it. "Well, you know, not _good_ as in 'gee, I'm glad you're not Riley because he's so horrible and sucky', which he mostly isn't, just good as in... good. I'm glad it's you."

"Me too," Tara says, then, "I mean, I'm glad you're glad."

Willow is still smiling. It's like her face is broken, or something, like she couldn't stop even if she wanted to. Not that she does. "I, uh, tried to call you just before. Did you see it?"

"See it? No, I -- oh, I was probably on the phone. It just rings out if it's busy, doesn't have an engaged signal. My lab partner called, we have to meet up to work on our project for finals."

"Today?" Willow asks. She thinks she's done a good job of masking the (mostly irrational) disappointment in her voice.

But then again, maybe she hasn't, because Tara's voice is warm and knowing when she huffs out, "Nah, tomorrow. You want to--" she starts to say, at the same time Willow takes a breath and asks,

"Do you maybe have time to--"

And they both laugh, the tension not quite broken but instead pulled tight between them, taut in a different way. A charged kind of way.

"--come over?" Tara finishes, before Willow can ask the same thing. "Or are you busy?"

Willow glances over at her desk, at her closed psychology textbook, and thinks it looks peaceful, lying there on top of her notebook. It would just be unkind to disturb it now.

"Nope, not busy. See you in ten?"

*

Ten becomes twenty: first Willow realises she spilled ketchup on her sweater during lunch and has to dig around for another decent one -- easier said than done the day before laundry day -- and then she gets held up by an unexpected clump of several students and two ambulance officers crowding her exit at the bottom of the stairs. She stays a moment to investigate, suspecting the forces of darkness, but it just turns out to be the combined and ever-powerful forces of stupidity and incompetence: some kid a floor above them decided it would be an awesome idea to take a running leap and slide down the bannister. It wasn't, unless lying on a stretcher with your leg twisted underneath you is this guy's idea of a good time. Once the kid has been walked out of the school and is headed towards the ambulance, the crowd thins, and Willow is finally able to push her way out of the doors and over to Tara's dormroom, where she arrives a little out of breath and holding the pack of raspberry-white chocolate cookies she picked up along the way.

"Hey," she says, grinning wide when Tara opens the door and smiles at her through her bangs. "Sorry I'm late. I brought cookies." She gestures to said cookies, in the interest of avoiding any potential cookie-related confusion.

"You didn't have to," Tara says. "But thanks." She pushes the door wider and inclines her head to the room beyond, doesn't invite her in with words. Willow enters, feeling, as she always does, the same peculiar, inimitable sense of warmth and comfort when she crosses the threshhold into Tara's space. It's ironic, she sometimes thinks, how a room so lowly lit, so full of deep, dark, rich colours, can be the warmest, lightest place she's ever known.

She doesn't say this, though she knows she could and Tara wouldn't freak out at the thought, but it's too soon; it's too soon for her, even if she doesn't think she has anything to fear. Instead, and because it's still true, she says, "I really love your room."

"I'm glad."

Willow shuts the door behind them and turns back to her. "So." The curtains are open a crack, and the last rays of sunlight are stretching their orange fingers through the branches of the evergreen outside Tara's window, soft patterns of shadow dancing across her face, and Willow forgets what she wanted to say. She had something to say, she's sure of it, but then Tara was -- then Tara's eyes were --

She coughs a little, feels the heat on her cheeks and is relieved for the mask of semi-darkness around them; Tara had been sitting without the lights on, it seems, and there's just one small, low-flickering candle on the floor. Willow raises the pack, still in her hand, plastic rustling. "Cookie?"

It takes Tara a moment to drag her eyes away, too, and she's smiling when she finally does. "Sure. Come sit." Tara climbs onto her bed and flops against the headboard, and it's too easy for Willow to follow her. It would be weird, wouldn't it, if she didn't? Wouldn't it seem like something was wrong?

Tara doesn't have any plates, so she grabs an old sheet of newspaper from the floor and spreads it out on the bedspread, uses it to catch up the crumbs. "These are good," Tara pronounces around a mouthful.

"They're just store-bought," Willow shrugs; she feels kinda stupid for bringing them, now that she thinks about it, but she didn't want to turn up late and empty-handed. "I'll bake you some next time. I can bake, you know. Not everything, but I can do cookies." She thinks back to a couple of weeks earlier, to her combined apology/guilt assuaging cookie-baking spree. "I have lots of experience baking cookies. And, also, eating them. I'm good at that too."

"Good to know," Tara says, and then seriously, "it's important that we have some stuff in common." She delivers this in an entirely deadpan manner, complete with emphasising nod at the end, and Willow feels a surge of affection for her so strong she has to nibble on her cookie to... well. Not do something stupid, like say it, or tell her she's adorable, or grab her and... she might not finish that sentence in words in her mind, but she definitely finishes it with an image that warms her cheeks.

She recovers with relative speed, says, "Can't argue with that. Imagine if we would just sit here and stare at each other and have nothing to talk about? It would be tragic."

"Tragic," Tara repeats. Her smile is soft but it's also playful, hinting at a confidence that she otherwise rarely shows, and Willow notices, not for the first time, how Tara has grown more and more daring around her since -- since. Since the Thing. Willow likes it, likes the way it makes her feel more secure about what she's feeling, reassures her that she isn't imagining the slow build of heat between them, the way they seem to draw ever-closer to one another, ever more, every day, sometimes without ever closing the distance.

Time has passed, and they are still staring at each other, grinning like idiots, and then Tara says, "So, how do you feel?"

"Hmm?"

"How do you feel?" she asks again, readjusting herself on the bed so she's leaning against the headboard. "Since the spell, I mean?"

"Oh," Willow says, because she hadn't been expecting that. "Good, I feel good. A little tired, don't think I'll be doing much magic for a few more days, but... yeah. Generally." She nods along with her words, tilts her head. "How do _you_ feel?"

"Uh, yeah, also good. Mostly." Tara's glance slides away from hers for a moment, and she coughs once. "So your appetite's normal?"

Willow raises an eyebrow. "I guess so, I mean, I didn't notice anything out of the--"

Tara points wordlessly at the now-empty packet of cookies in Willow's lap, grins.

"--ordinary," Willow finishes. She gets up, a little guiltily, to deposit the empty pack and the crumbed-up newspaper in the trashcan. "Maybe I have been a little hungier than usual, but other than that." She shrugs.

Tara nods. "That's good. It's normal, I mean, to feel extra hungry after... after this kind of spell. Don't be surprised if you start to crave weird stuff, either, like the skin of a kiwi fruit or a peanut shell or something. That's normal too." Tara laughs; Willow supposes she must look as doubtful as she feels. "The last time I did a spell sorta like this I ate a whole lime. I was kinda freaked out 'til my mom explained that it's a side effect of interacting with the forces of the Netherworld. Not eating the lime specifically, but y'know." 

"I get it. Thanks for telling me." Willow extends her hand, so easy, and laces her fingers through Tara's. Tara squeezes, smiles, doesn't let go.

"Sure. You might also have, uh, dreams. If you haven't already."

Willow shakes her head, thinks back to last night - she and Buffy got back late, really late, collapsing into their beds just as the sky was beginning to lighten, strips of pale blue streaking across the tops of the Sunnydale buildings, and Willow slept deep and dreamless and too little, roused by the screeching serenade of her alarm clock too soon. "I didn't last night, but good to know. You mean bad dreams, right? Like nightmares?"

"Depends." Tara shrugs, a bit of her self-consciousness returning. "Could be. They could also just be kind of... intense."

"Ooh, cryptic." Willow raises an eyebrow. "So have you had any? Dreams?"

Tara pauses, looks for a moment as though she's considering saying something else, and then, "Yeah." She looks down at their hands, still intertwined, but won't meet Willow's eyes. "Last night."

Willow scoots a little closer on the bed, ducks her head to try to get Tara to look at her. "Was it bad? Do you want to talk about it?"

Tara makes a sound that is halfway between a laugh and a snort; the pressure on Willow's hand increases for a moment, lessens again almost as quickly. "You know how I said it can be kind of intense? I didn't mean, like... bad intense. Necessarily."

Later, Willow's embarrassed that it takes her a moment to get it -- she's still finding her way out of a mental place populated by violence and demons and _Faith_ , Faith and the awful way she spins into town and destroys the balance, every time, messes up everything good. But it is only a moment, and then the shyness on Tara's face and the hesitation in her words and the context come together, and Willow sees. "Oh," she says. "Oh. That's--"

"Yeah," Tara says.

"So not all bad," Willow says. "Good, even." Her fingers are still curved around Tara's, stroking softly.

Tara's head jerks up then, and she stutters, "It - it is?"

After a beat, Willow says, "Sure. I mean, I know I'm not the all sex all the time super party girl, but hey, I can appreciate a good dream now and then."

"Of course, I didn't mean to -- I wasn't saying I -- it's just--"

"Hey." Willow reaches out, gentle, to tip Tara's chin up with her hand. What she really wants to ask is, _Why are you stuttering around me?_. What she does ask is, "What's up?"

"I just wasn't sure if you'd--" she stops, sighs, raises her eyes. "You were in the dream, too. With me."

Why she hadn't figured this out earlier, when all the signs were right there in front of her, plain as day, Willow will never know, but the meaning of the words settles over her like a blanket, like morning sunlight streaming warm and bright through her window.

"Oh," she says, and is surprised by the roughness of her own voice. She clears her throat, sneaks a glance up at Tara, who is staring with ever-increasing interest at the stripes on her own socks. She wants to say, _Did you like it?_ ; she wants to say, _What did we do_ ; she wants to say, _Come here and show me_. Instead she says, "Cool," and feels like Xander. 

"Really?" Thankfully, Tara doesn't seem bothered by her sudden and vaguely horrifying lack of finesse. Her hand is now squeezing Willow's so tightly that Willow wonders if she's going to lose circulation, and doesn't care. She squeezes right back, sweeps her thumb across the ridge of Tara's, and grins.

"Really."

*

"You never told me what Buffy said," Willow remembers, later, when they've tidied up the unanticipated chaos caused by their well-intentioned but sadly less well-excuted telekinesis spell, and are once again enjoying the not-cleaning part of the evening. It's night, really; the sky is dark and heavy, the waning moon shrouded in cloud, and they are lying side-by-side on Tara's bed, not touching, a mere few precious, terrible inches of space separating their arms. Willow imagines she can feel the electricity between them, even through the layers of their clothes, and wonders if she's imagining it; she decides then it doesn't matter. It's nice either way.

Tara looks over at her, her eyes a question.

"At the Bronze. When you knew she wasn't her. When you said she was kind of mean." Willow shakes her head. "Faith, I mean. What did Faith say?"

"Oh," Tara says, though she looks a little like she already knew that, like she's maybe been expecting this all along. "Well, she, uh. She made fun of my stuttering."

Willow narrows her eyes. "Did I ever mention that I have my issues with that girl?"

"Maybe once or twice." Tara laughs a little. "Plus she was... well. Kind of crude."

This surprises her; it shouldn't, because it's Faith, but it does. She sits up. "How do you mean?"

"About you," Tara says softly. "About you and Oz, and... about you and me."

"So she--" _saw something_ , _guessed_ , _knew_ , but Tara saves her.

"Yeah. She made this comment about, about us, and her energy was all fractured, and I knew something wasn't right."

"That's amazing," Willow murmurs. "You're amazing, Tara. Buffy's my best friend and I didn't get it. I mean, I thought she seemed a little off, maybe, but that happens, y'know? If it weren't for you I never would have guessed."

"Sure you would have."

"Okay, maybe I would have, but it would have been too late. Who knows where Faith might have taken Buffy's body by then?" She shudders. She does that a lot when she thinks of Faith. "It's so awful to think about. Imagine if she'd gotten away, and Buffy was stuck in Faith's body, and we had to look at Faith's face all the time? She would be my _roommate_. Ugh."

Tara shifts closer, extends a hand to trace soft patterns on the sleeve of Willow's sweater with her fingernails. "It wouldn't be like that forever, though, you know. Eventually you would stop seeing the outside, and start to think of her as Buffy, because it would be Buffy's energy that came through. Plus she would dress different, I guess. Somehow I get the feeling the real Buffy doesn't go so much for black leather and dark lipstick." 

Willow laughs. "Sometimes, but not so much." She sobers, thinks about what Tara's just said. "I guess you're right, that we'd eventually get used to it. But it would be so weird, to have Buffy be in Faith's body, being my best friend and knowing all my best-friend secrets and all the while looking like my enemy. And imagine if Buffy came back, and we were used to Faith-Buffy being all nice, and then Buffy-Faith was all evil, and we were -- okay, this is getting confusing."

But Tara's smiling. "I'm with you."

Willow's still sitting up, but now she scoots down until she's lying beside Tara, right beside her, and curls a hand into her shirt, holds on. "I know."

She drifts, lulled into peace by Tara's even breathing, and sleeps.

*

Seconds, minutes, hours, days later she wakes, ripped out of semi-consciousness by the racing of her heart and the sudden feeling that she is drowning, surrounded by heat and fire and feeling, flames at the pit of her stomach, licking their way up her legs and her arms and her neck. She gasps, reaches out, finds what she's looking for when she pulls Tara towards her and crushes their bodies together. Willow is almost shaking, and Tara's breath hitches against her; Tara pulls back and looks at her, warm, warm hands cupping her face, searching her eyes in the dark.

"Willow? What is it? Are you okay?"

Willow has to laugh, a sound that chokes its way out of her throat as she nods her assent. Her cheeks feel hot and tight, her mouth dry, but she manages to croak out, "Fine. I just... get what you mean by 'intense'."

"It's something else, huh," Tara whispers, and Willow itches, itches to crawl outside her own skin and into Tara's, and she wonders how Tara can just lie there looking so calm and collected when Willow is burning up inside.

Tara grins at her, a blend of her usual shyness and something else, something wickeder, something brave. "Maybe I just have more practice," she says, and then Willow realises (too late to bother with mortification) that she's said it out loud.

"Tara," Willow says, her hands in Tara's hair, on her cheeks, at her neck, stroking, touching, feeling, _wanting_ , driving herself mad. "Tara, I don't--"

"What?" Tara murmurs, and she shifts closer, arm sliding around Willow's waist, and they're nose to nose.

"Can you feel it?"

"Always."

"What's my energy doing? What do you see in me now?"

"I see heat," Tara whispers, and there's a kind of awe in her voice that would probably make Willow blush, at any other time, in any other place. "It's like your aura is crackling, like it's... it's singing. It's like you're on fire." She traces her thumb across Willow's lip. "It's amazing."

"For me too," Willow admits, and nips at Tara's fingertip with her teeth. "I can't -- I don't know how much longer I can hold out," she admits, her voice rougher than expects. "If you want me to go, then I, I think I need to go." She presses her face into Tara's neck, breathes in the salty scent of her skin, risks a flick of her tongue to the hollow of Tara's collarbone. "As in, right now."

"I don't want you to go." Tara's hand is in her hair, now, fingers threading through strong and soft before they scrape down the back of her neck, and she lets out a low breath and arches up, across, into the touch.

"Are you sure?" Willow asks, even as she feels Tara's other hand, the one that's been outlining circles of madness and flame over her hipbone, slip under her shirt to press at the small of her back, drawing her nearer. It is almost automatic for Willow to echo this motion, and she finds her own arms around Tara's waist, her hands on soft skin, before she even makes it a conscious choice.

"I'm sure," Tara says. "You don't -- you don't know how long I've wanted you to be here. Even before. Before the dreams, I mean."

Willow leans in, presses their foreheads together, revels in breathing Tara's air. "I'm glad." And now she grins. "It's the same for me, you know. The dreams... are awesome, don't get me wrong, but I really think I could have managed on my--"

And then the rest of her rambling bundle of nerves of a sentence doesn't matter because Tara's kissing her, kissing her with lips that are warm and soft and confident, with the kind of control and certainty Willow usually only witnesses from her during spells, but which she knows, she always knew, was simmering just beneath Tara's skin. She sinks into it, her moan a release of relief as much as passion, as much as encouragment, because all she can think is, _finally_. They're finally here. Willow rolls, rests her weight against the length of Tara's body, takes advantage of the better angle to kiss her hard, to trap her bottom lip between her teeth, and Tara gasps, hisses out, " _Yes_ ," and hooks her cool bare foot tight around Willow's calf. 

It's like the dream again, Willow realises; it's like the dream only now she's awake, and the racing, pounding, thudding, catapulting of her heart is a thing she's really feeling, a response to a situation she's really living, and not just her mind. It's the truth that she feels that at any moment now her heart might just gallop right out of her chest, or ram so hard against her ribcage she'll pass out -- and she wonders how she's even still breathing, how she's still alive in the face of this intensity.

Tara's hands are all over her, the thing she wants most in the world, and Willow's hands are all over Tara, and Tara sighs, moans her encouragment as Willow's lips make their way down her neck, over her collarbone and down.

They don't speak; they don't need to, the language of lips and tongues and fingers and laughter and friction and heat, so much heat, more than sufficient to do the talking for them. It builds and it grows and it pulses between them, around them, inside them, until Tara stills beneath her and then cries out, soft and sweet, into the darkness.

*

They sleep, Willow's head curled into the crook of Tara's neck, hair splayed halfway across Tara's face; she wakes when Tara tries to gently blow it out of the way and winds up coughing instead.

"Hmph?" Willow asks, an expression of concern for Tara's health that she hopes is at least somewhat comprehensible. Voice scratchy, Tara coughs again and explains, with a self-conscious laugh, what happened. It finally kicks in, Willow's general ability to function as a human before 10am, and she props herself up on her elbow to look down at Tara, reaches down to run her fingers through her hair, delights that she can, delights that she no longer has to hold back.

"Sleepyhead," she murmurs, and can hear the affection laced through her own voice. She doesn't mind.

"What time is it?"

Willow leans over her, doesn't pretend not to enjoy the way it makes their chests press together, to catch sight of the clock: 8.20. "Dang," she mutters, without venom. "I have to go soon, I have class at 9am."

"Me too."

"We should get up," Willow says, and flops back down. Tara laughs, draws a warm arm around her, pulls her in.

"We really should."

They're quiet, but the window's open, and a bird is perched in a tree branch somewhere nearby, making its presence known. _Spring is coming_ , it seems to be saying. _We knew it would_.

"You know something?" Tara says suddenly, and Willow turns to look at her.

"What thing?"

"Faith is actually kind of the reason we're here right now."

She's about to protest, on instinct, but then Willow takes a moment to consider it. "You're kinda right. As much as I hate to admit it... if it weren't for her and her diabolical body-switching machinations, who knows how long it might have taken us to... get our act together?"

Tara nods sagely, brushing a stray lock of hair from out of Willow's eyes. "That's causality for you. Everything has a reason."

"Indeed," Willow says. "Though I, for one, sincerely hope that we never see Faith again." She leans down and fits her mouth to Tara's, slow and deliberate, kisses her long and warm and indulgent, the potential offence of morning breath be damned. When she finally pulls away, she grins. "I hope we don't. But if we do, I'll make sure to thank her."


End file.
